Making martyr of Prigozhin is a tyrant's folly

MOMENTS before I came face-toface with two Russian Wagner Group fighters taken prisoner in Ukraine an intelligence officer pulled me aside.

- CHRIS HUGHES

He told me: “When you meet these two, try to see a sign of life in their eyes. We have all been saying, they look dead, not a sign of life.”

Our meeting in February at a secret location in Ukraine made us the first to interview the captured “Wagnerites”.

Both had been plucked from prison by Yevgeny Prigozhin with the promise of money and freedom if they survived the front line.

One, murderer Viktor, told me: “He kept his promises.”

Talking about his sentence for stabbing a man to death in a nightclub brawl, he shrugged: “He was Chechen”, as if that justified it.

The intelligence officer had been right: Viktor’s eyes were dead.

Putin calculated that sending convicts to die on the front line would make Russians care less about the rising death toll.